Name dropping

It was late morning when I parked beside a truck faded like torn denim. In the driver’s seat, a dog propped its head on the steering wheel. Its eyes followed me through the cloudy windshield as I walked into the gas station.

We last night in a dusty bar lit with close yellow bulbs. It was like drinking in the attic. You had the face of my mother’s high school boyfriend.

In the parking lot, we kissed with the windows down and moths collecting in the corners of your car. The only light in your house came from the fridge when I stole a beer at dawn. I skipped an uneven porch step and checked your mail as I left.

I bought a beer and waited as the drowsy cashier placed it in a brown paper bag and handed it back. I felt the silvery cool can through the crisp paper as I walked outside, then slid it out into my hand. Before driving away, I dropped your wallet and watch into the bag, wrapped it neatly around itself, and slipped it in the side of the door as the dog licked my ear.

Traveling

The next morning, we fell from either side of the bed, split from the backs and cramped shoulders we paired like dominoes. We left before the car was warm. I sat in the faded blue cloth seat, gently squeezing a thin-walled foam cup of coffee.

We drove casually, deliberately into the valley, into the fog. And suddenly the world aged like a photograph.

In the woods edging the asphalt, I saw the shadow of a settler who didn’t know loneliness: the world had always echoed with more space than breaths, more seasons than voices.

She realized she was alone only after roads spread like cracks across dry ground.

Only after his boots strode hollowly over the floor boards and his coat hung over the shoulders of the chair. After mornings curled tightly around unspoken words like chapped hands around a hot metal cup.

Only after he closed the door as he trailed the sun westward.

…Sun exposed the road once more and her image disappeared like dust settling in a pattern of its own wind.

There’s a reason why sound is not the absence of silence.

Lost?

Intuition only works if you’ve evolved properly.

Sometimes I fear I’m a side-tracked descendant of the species that ends up alone and three feet tall on a remote tropical island. Not that I have fewer tools or less intelligence: occasionally, even the greatest of potential dead ends.

You’re an original, baby, just like everyone else

My grandfather used to paint wall-sized tigers on long paper scrolls. His steady hand drew fierce, dark strokes, crafting the coat mark by mark, a tally of time and ink to track the creation of his art. Nobody creates beauty like that any more, not even my grandfather. He wanders the park near his home now, and takes long naps in a brown leather chair, the soft sunlight stirring dust motes as he quietly breathes into the afternoon.

It’s a different kind of art that he’s left me, older than the two generations that separate us. There’s something contemplative and solid about it, as though he layered moments of his life into each line, folding secrets and breaths into each hidden color.

Three of his children became artists, but none of them followed his form — one prefers the brash geometry of modern art; the other two love the immediacy of pencil. My own art resides in pixelated images. We’ve lost the substance of his work, so we try to compensate with proliferation; we produce piece after piece to equal one of his.

I sometimes wonder what I’ll pass on to my own grandchildren, but I know it won’t be my art — there’s no story to what I create, no image evoked beyond what is immediately seen. Most modern aesthetics push me forward, concentrating on perception and reaction, not retroactive reflection, but my grandfather’s paintings… well, there’s a life behind each one — a glimpse of time captured in each stroke, something more vibrant than the man he is now. It’s both sad and wonderful. Like I said: nobody creates beauty like that anymore. Not even him.

part 1

Half my life is spent reassuring others that I am, indeed, a girl. The other half is left silent, my wordless reply an affirmation of whichever destiny they choose for me.

It began, as far as I know, at age three, when I arrived on Connor and Lena Hamilton’s early morning porch, a surprisingly clean child, alone, and clutching a bedraggled stuffed elephant. “Sebastian,” read the painful stitching across its rear. “Sebastian,” I quietly answered to all their questions. So Sebastian I became, which is no less incredible, I suppose, than the reason why they took me in. I had such odd eyes, they said, sleepy and unsurprised, as though I recognized the place as home–as though the only mild shock was that someone else stayed there as well.

The Hamiltons lived in the house Connor grew up in, an old place with three sharply angled green gables and siding with white paint that peeled and curled like birch bark. It used to be his great aunt’s, until she eloped in her retirement with her high school sweetheart, discarding all evidence of the decades with her forgettable first husband.

But back to me, the abandoned child who arrived no less lost than those who found me. And how else should they have been? A young couple, childless and not looking to be otherwise. What were they to know of pre-dawn offerings, of broken family trees, limbs lost or clipped? I, for one, knew enough of what I saw to be the least disoriented. A man and woman, a sticky peanut butter sandwich, a warm bed, a morning sun that woke me as it drew bright lines toward my face. More people, more food, more sleep, more sun. What else is there to know?

ornithophobia

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle / Que nul ne peut apprivoiser

(”Love is a rebellious bird that nobody can tame”)

dusty

Dusty Springfield singing a warm 70s glow. Pebbled glass tumbler sliding cool and wet under aimless stroking fingertips.

Late summer sun setting over the yellowing and fading fields.

55Fiction Friday

A little girl and her mother lie on cartoon-printed sheets.

“Do I get the whole cookie now?”

“Yes, sweetie.”

“Who gets to sit in the blue chair?”

“You can.”

The little girl purses her lips, then shakes her head. “I don’t want his spot.” She wriggles away, leaving a small warm body space between them.

You are what you love, not what loves you back

They stand beside Anna’s car as the cooling engine pops softly. The sun sets over the lake, its reflection dissolving in slim gold undulations.

Squares of yellow light blink on in houses on the opposite shore. It has been a long day. Anna stops about a foot from the waterline and draws out one hand, holding the key loosely in her palm, fingertips curled and hovering. He closes his eyes against the smoke-smudged horizon.

Anna scuffs a shoe over the wet sand and he opens his eyes, watching as she clenches her fist, then suddenly throws the key. It sinks out of sight like a metal fish.

“One,” she says.

“What?”

“Only one. I guess keys don’t make good skipping stones.”

As they return to her car, he’s glad he’s not driving because he wouldn’t have known where to go.

back to square one

Why do people run away?

Because they feel lost already and they believe that movement can counteract the dizziness. It’s like turning yourself in the opposite direction after whirling in place, trying to reverse the revolving world and your spinning mind along with it.

But you never can.

Why do people come back? Because when you howl into the canyon, you always hear the echo right back where you begin. You can ask the world where you should be and if you listen, –if you listen, the world tells you exactly where you belong.